


Love is Weakness

by crossingwinter



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Sexual Content, Sugar Mama AU (Kind Of)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-17 03:28:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29343588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: “He’s someone I found on my recent trip to Corellia,” Rey replies placidly, her face practiced in its boredom.  “It doesn’t mean anything.”“Love is weakness,” her grandfather reminds her, the way he has for years.  It’s why he doesn’t love her.  He will not be weak.  It’s why she doesn’t love him, either.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 34
Kudos: 248
Collections: To Find Your Kiss: The Reylo Fanfiction Anthology's Valentine's Day Exchange





	Love is Weakness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bittersnake](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bittersnake/gifts).



> For bittersnake, whose prompt was:
> 
> (AU, preference is Canonverse though) Rey is essentially a Sith Princess. Please give me a sugar mama AU!! If you are somehow able to merge it into canonverse I will love you forever and ever. Please keep canonical age differences.

“What’s this?”

Her grandfather waves a hand and the news headlines on the holo shift.

_ PRINCESS PALPATINE’S NEW BEAU _

There’s a picture of her, walking through the shopping district next to him. He’s taller than her by about a foot, and his hair is long and shaggy. He’d shaved off the horrid goatee, thank goodness, and he’s tilting his head towards her in the little video they have under the headline.

It almost looks like they’re in love.

Just like they planned.

“Someone I found on my recent trip to Corellia,” Rey replies placidly, her face practiced in its boredom. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Love is weakness,” her grandfather reminds her, the way he has for years. It’s why he doesn’t love her. He will not be weak. It’s why she doesn’t love him, either. “Isn’t that right, Lord Vader?”

His lieutenant is old--like himself--and he merely breathes mechanically as he stands there at her grandfather’s shoulder. He doesn’t say anything. Through the Force, Rey feels a slight pang.  _ Loss _ . But as ever, she can gather nothing from the masked man.

“Don’t worry,” Rey tells them both. “There’s no risk of that. He’s just a bit of fun.”

“Make sure that you’re properly protected in your fun,” her grandfather barks out.

“I assume you mean praetorian guard, because I’m not a fool who forgets her prophylactic and ends up pregnant.”

Again, there’s that pang of loss she feels through Vader. She ignores it.

She knows better than to be curious and pry about Vader. Her grandfather mocks the curiosity and Vader won’t answer her questions. 

“Good,” her grandfather says at last. “Learning from your father’s mistakes.”

Rey bites her tongue. It’s as though she’s standing under the hot Jakku sun again, screaming  _ come back _ at a starship that’s leaving her behind. It hadn’t come back. But her grandfather had found her in the end.

“I will,” she says idly. “Just a bit of fun. His father got tied up in Crimson Dawn.”

Her grandfather’s eyes flickered, and Vader crossed his arms.  _ Ah yes, there it is. _

He hated being reminded that Maul still lived.

She gets to her feet. “Anything else?”

He waves his hand and she departs, sweeping long beaded skirts around her and returning to her chambers. 

-

_ Rey Palpatine, the granddaughter and heir to our Grand Emperor, has been sighted on Coruscant arm in arm with an unknown man. Sources close to the Imperial Palace have no comment on who the man might be, or how he and the princess met. _

-

He’s getting better at it.

Fucking her, that is.

“What do they teach you on Corellia?” she had asked the first time when he’d spent a good twenty minutes doing his best, but not really succeeding at anything. She’d softened the question by rubbing his ass. “You do not need to be this gentle.”

“A little more lubrication, please.”

“And now the same, but with your tongue.”

He’s definitely getting better at it.

For one thing, he doesn’t have to be asked to press his face between her legs, and lick her until her knees are shaking. She likes not having to ask for it. 

“It’s a very simple arrangement, actually,” she’d told him when she’d found him in a Corellian alleyway and had been unable to look away.  _ Rash,  _ a voice in her head had told her.  _ Rash, and impulsive--everything he wants you not to be.  _ Which was, of course, exactly why she did it. “I will pay for everything. And you…” She had trailed away suggestively. His ears had gone red.

His ears aren’t red now as he licks his way up and down her labia. She plays with them, strokes them between her fingers. He hums. “Rough day?” he asks her and she thinks she can feel it, thinks she can but doesn’t let herself trust it because she isn’t actually familiar with the sensation of being cared for.

Before she can answer, a wave of relief floods her, warm and soft and overpowering. 

“Don’t tease me,” she says. 

“I’m not,” he says as he climbs up her body. “May I?” He nudges her slit with the tip of his dick.

“Not yet, pet,” she tells him, and he rolls over to the side, his erection prodding the ceiling, long and veined and flushed. 

“Don’t tease you, but you tease me.”

“Brat,” she replies without missing a beat. He grins a crooked grin.

She likes his crooked grins, the way they make his face light up, the way he looks ten years younger--her own age--rather than ten years older. 

“Did he say something about us?” he asks, trailing the back of his fingers down her bicep. 

“Yes.” 

“And?”

She takes a deep breath. “I told him you mean nothing. So don’t forget that, all right?” She says it lightly, playfully, hoping it masks the acute discomfort of knowing it is, increasingly, a lie.

“All right,” he replies, and he presses a kiss to her shoulder.

She shivers.

_ Nothing _ , she tells herself.  _ I pay for him. This is all nothing. If he cares, it’s because I’m giving him everything he could possibly want. _

When she does let him press into her, rutting and thrusting and panting and telling her how beautiful she is, she can’t help but feel just how pathetic it is that the High Princess of the Galaxy has to pay for love.

-

_ Our journalists can now reveal that Princess Rey’s new beau is named BEN SOLO, the son of junkyard merchant HAN SOLO, by an unknown mother, and was raised on Corellia by his father. Han Solo has been imprisoned in carbonite for the past fifteen years for an overdue debt to the Hutts. _

-

Their arrangement is a simple one. She gives him what he wants, and he… 

He gives her what she wants. 

She buys him a new blaster, a new spaceship, a new wardrobe--fit for a princess’ consort. She buys him gizmos and gadgets, food and drink. She pays for everything and gives it to him.

And he gives her his smile, he gives her a softness in his eyes she’s not used to seeing anywhere, he gives her a whisper in her ear when they are out and about, words meant only for her ears that make her shiver.

_ He means nothing,  _ she’d told her grandfather, but that, she suspects, isn’t true. What means nothing to her are the blaster, the spaceship, the wardrobe; the gizmos and gadgets, food and drink.

He is not nothing. Not a nobody from nowhere. He’s Ben. And his hand at the small of her back makes her feel things she’s frightened of feeling, because if Ben can make her feel this way, does that make her weak? Soft? Childish? Impulsive?

-

_ TRUE LOVE IN THE PALACE: While Emperor Palpatine is famous for not allowing pictures to be taken of the palace grounds, someone seems to be spreading a photo of a heated kiss. While we can’t say for sure who’s sharing it, body proportions backlit through the curtains suggest it might be Princess Rey and her paramour. _

-

He gets moody sometimes. 

“It’s not you,” he tells her once after slamming a door and storming from their chambers. He looks nervous, like he’s worried she’ll throw him away like garbage. Like everyone else. “It’s… it’s this.”

“Does it feel like a cage?” she asks him. 

He looks away, around the beautiful, bright room. It feels darker because he’s upset.

“This does,” he says and he turns back to her. “You don’t, though.” Suddenly he sounds desperate. “I didn’t think it would be this way. Where I’d--I’d like you. I figured it’d be a few months, getting some shit to hawk that I could then use to save my Dad. You were pretty and rich, and it would be fine. I could fuck you for a few months.” It stings like a slap. It shouldn’t. It shouldn’t hurt at all.  _ Love is weakness _ . Caring about him has made her weak. That was their agreement, wasn’t it? That he’d fuck her, but not love her? How pathetic she was, to think that that was all that was required for love. Love was sacrificing yourself to save your father.

How much love he must have for his father.

How little she had for her grandfather.

“Rey.” His hands are cupping her face, his thumbs tracing her lips and she looks up at him. “Please don’t.”

“Don’t what?” she asks.

“Don’t think I—” he pauses. He swallows. He looks like he’s chewing air, his jaw rolling a little bit. Then he bends to kiss her.

_ A lie,  _ she thinks as his tongue traces her lips the way his thumb had before slipping between them.  _ A sweet lie.  _

He sighs. “You’re not a cage,” he whispers. “You’re in one, too.”

-

_ WILL THEY OR WON’T THEY: Today marks six months since Princess Rey Palplatine began her affair with Ben Solo, a smuggler’s son from Corellia. She seems to have spent a lot of time investing in him, given the clothes on his back and the new rig. Will they tie the knot? Does her grandfather approve? _

_ - _

“I don’t approve of this,” her grandfather tells her as the datapad floats through the air towards her. “If you are to marry, it will be someone of my choosing. I do not like this speculation that you should marry him, and the longer you are with him, the more people think you are in love.”

“He is fully aware that he is nothing to me,” Rey replies, bored.

“He isn’t nothing to you. The way you look at him in these—”

But Rey looks up and for the first time in her life, her grandfather falls silent. “Do you not think I know how to keep up appearances? You who trained me so well shouldn’t doubt what I have learned. It makes them happy to think that I am in love, and their happiness is to your benefit. It’s better to have a headline like this than to have more questioning what’s happening on Kamino.”

Her grandfather starts to laugh. “I should have him killed. If you’re going to defend him like that, you are weaker than I thought.”

It should be cutting and horrible, the idea of Ben dead in an alleyway because her grandfather had his men take care of him. Perhaps a locked room with Vader, whose blade is the deadliest in the galaxy. But instead, Rey is calm. Heartless. Because love is weakness, like her grandfather told her, and she doesn’t love him. If she loved him, it would hurt. “You could,” she said. “But I think then you’d leave me no choice but to appear wretchedly heartbroken for months. Years perhaps. Because unless I end it amicably, then people will wonder, won’t they.”

“You’ll do as I say,” he barked out.

“I only seek to advise you, since as you age, you forget how to think logically on the matters of power,” Rey said idly, examining her fingernails. “There is power in appearances, Grandfather. Them thinking I have a heart means they will assume that you and I love one another. And that is something that will please them, for a grandfather and granddaughter should love one another. There is a power in lies.”

_ I don’t love him. _

“If that’s all,” she said, and didn’t wait for a reply before leaving.

She finds Ben in her suite. He’s taken to building things. She’s found him with a deconstructed blaster, a datapad, and a toaster in the past few weeks. 

He doesn’t look up when she comes in, but she doesn’t mind. His face is perfectly focused as he works on whatever he’s working on. She wraps her arms under his arms and around his chest. “What are you working on today?”

“I found a lightsaber.”

She freezes. “Found?”

“Well, bought on the black market. I wanted to see how it works.”

Her heart is now racing in her chest, racing faster than it had when she’d been in the room with her grandfather threatening his death. Maybe because she’s holding him in her arms. 

“Don’t let my grandfather see you with that.”

He tilts his head back. “Worried about me?”

“Yes. You make stupid decisions.”

He laughed and pressed a kiss to the side of her face. “You’re the stupidest decision I’ve ever made.” But the way he says it--it sounds like the opposite of what he meant. There it is again, that flash of caring that she catches when she’s having sex with him, or when they’re out and about and she says something to make him laugh. 

“If you’re going to make it, you might as well make sure to practice with it. I don’t want you getting jumped in an alley.”

“The last time I was jumped in an alley turned out ok,” Ben says, but the joke doesn’t land for her this time. Yes,  _ she’d _ been the one to jump him, she’d been the one to help him out of a scrape, to kiss him and hold him and convince him to be her pet, but this time—

“Ben, be serious.”

“I’m always serious,” he replies, and this time, he sounds serious. “I’ll practice with it. What’s got you so worried?”

She doesn’t respond. She’s holding him tighter, now. Holding him so tightly that when he turns, it feels like he’s wrenching himself from her.

“Rey?”

“I don’t want to lose you,” she whispers. A confession to herself--to him--that she hadn’t been able to let herself think in the room with her grandfather. It felt, sometimes, like she was a different person when she was in the room with her grandfather than when she was in the room with Ben. It felt like that woman was hard so that this woman could be soft. Weak.

“I love you,” she whispered. 

He stops breathing, goes still as a statue. 

“I don’t want to lose you,” she continues. “And if you don’t love me, fine. I know what our arrangement is. I know what it always has been. I—”

But she doesn’t get to finish because Ben’s lips are on hers, his hands fisting in the sides of her dress. He’s pulling her so that she’s on his worktable, the half-built lightsaber clattering to the floor as he’s tugging up her skirt, as he’s pushing into her, panting, breathing hard.

“The only thing you’ve given me that matters is your love,” he whispers as he pauses. His eyes are deep and dark and earnest. 

By now, when he fucks her, he knows what he’s doing. He plays her body like an instrument, knows how to build her orgasms the way he builds whatever he’s taken apart. It feels a little bit like he’s taken her apart and rebuilt her better. When he moves now, it’s slow, his fingers on her clit, his lips on her neck, his heart pressed against her chest. Slow, and deep, and sharply, Rey realizes that that caring feeling she’d felt in him for months--it wasn’t caring.

It was love. 

She hadn’t known how to recognize it because she hadn’t known it until then. But she knows it now because she feels it blossoming in her as she clings to him, as he brings her to the edge and over and back, kissing until nothing but they two exists.

-

_ NO MOVEMENT FROM THE HUTTS: Rotta the Hutt has expressed no willingness to sell Han Solo’s carbonite to the Imperial Palace. It is unclear if this has been requested, as no announcement was made from the Emperor’s Office, however he went on Holo this afternoon saying he would die before parting with his prisoner. _

-

“I can try and acquire your father, and free him,” Rey tells Ben. It’s the one thing she hasn’t tried to offer him before. Diplomatic tensions with the Hutts are a tricky thing to manage, and she prefers to avoid making her grandfather think about Ben. 

Her head is pillowed on his chest and they are both covered in sweat. Her fingers are tracing over a scar in his lower abdomen, one he says he got as a child when his godfather’s blaster misfired. “ _ It nearly killed me _ .” She’s glad it didn’t. 

Ben shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I have to do it.”

“It won’t be any trouble,” Rey lies.

“It will be, because I swore I’d do it. You’ve just been distracting me.” He clearly is trying to tease her but his expression has tightened. He looks ten years older rather than ten years younger. She tilts her head and kisses the skin near his nipple.

“A welcome distraction, I hope?”

“A most welcome distraction.” He softens, but the tightness doesn’t go away, not completely. “The last thing I’d want is for you to get involved the way my mom did.”

Ben doesn’t talk about his mother. Rey never asks. She holds her breath now, though. He brought her up. She can wait.

“She died trying to save him the last time he was incarbonated,” Ben grits out. “I don’t really remember it. I was too young.”

“What was she like?” Rey asks.

“Fire,” Ben says at once. “Hope. Passion. She’d like you.” He kisses the top of her head. “She’d like you a lot.”

Rey smiles and wiggles a little bit next to him. “Would she like that I pay for you?” she teases. It feels like she doesn’t anymore. She knows that she does. He doesn’t have a job, but it feels—

It feels like balance. Love. Safety. Respect. All those other things that you can’t buy. 

“She’d like that you care for me,” he says seriously. “And that you’d offer to save Dad even though you don’t know what kind of a scoundrel he is.”

“I can guess,” Rey replies tartly. “He raised you.”

“I was wondering where I got it. He bagged a princess, too.”

Rey’s eyebrows shoot up, and she feels Ben stiffen underneath her. He hadn’t meant to say that, she’s sure.

“Who was she?” she asks at last.

He sighs. “Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan.”

-

_ GRANDFATHER DISAPPROVES: Though it is a rare day that the Emperor can be convinced to comment on his granddaughter’s activities, today he made a derisive comment about Ben Solo. “I had hoped he wouldn’t be with us this long,” the Emperor said, “Perhaps I should do something about it. A protective grandfather’s jest!” _

-

It sends her down a rabbit hole. Leia Organa, daughter of Bail and Breha Organa, adopted from an unknown mother. 

_ Unknown mothers, and fathers falling for princesses,  _ she thought as she stared at the words. Leia was killed by the Hutts, just as Ben said, though in the news articles she found it was because Leia was fighting with the rebellion to overthrow her grandfather. Maybe that was why Ben had been nervous to talk about her. 

_ She would have liked me. _

_ Would she have wanted me dead? _

Maybe. Rey hadn’t even been born when she’d died. But if she’d lived, surely she wouldn’t have wanted to harm a child? 

It didn’t matter, she supposed.

She researched Ben’s grandparents next, the Queen of Alderaan and her consort, a senator for the Republic. She found endless holos of the two of them, together and separately. In one, she found a pregnant woman who she learned was a senator for Naboo, who died not long afterwards.

The woman had Ben’s eyes.

She dug, and dug, and dug. The Nabooan senator was Padme Amidala Naberrie. She’d once been a queen. She’d never married, but gossip columns like the ones that hounded her and Ben suggested she might have been sleeping with a Jedi Knight assigned to protect her. His name was Anakin Skywalker. He had Ben’s lips. 

She didn’t know if she should tell him what she’d found. They were suspicions more than fact. 

Her grandfather must have known Padme Amidala. He served as senator for Naboo for a long time. Did he see her eyes in Ben? Or did he not bother to look long enough to notice?

“What are you doing?”

The voice was deep and Rey nearly jumped out of her skin when the question filled the room. Ordinarily, she could hear Vader approaching. Though his footsteps were quiet as a cat, his breathing always gave him away. 

She thinks he stares at her. She’s not totally sure. It’s hard to know where his eyes go behind his mask.

“What are  _ you _ doing here?” she asks.

“Your grandfather sent me for you,” he said. “He wishes to speak with you.”

“What about?” Rey asks, not really expecting a reply.

She doesn’t get one.

She sighs and turns back to her holo screen, saving the files that she’d found about Padme Amidala.

Then she feels it--a searing pain so intense that for a moment she wonders if she’s been stabbed. But the pain isn’t hers.

It’s Vader’s. 

She makes to close the file down, but for the first time in her life, Vader cuts in on an impulse. “No.”

“No?” 

She arches an eyebrow at him. She tries to be cool, detached, as she is with her grandfather and all his men, but there’s something unsettling about all this. Something that is familiar, and yet unfamiliar.

Vader doesn’t reply. She can tell from the angle of his head that he’s staring at Padme’s holo again, transfixed. 

_ Loss,  _ his heart beats.  _ Pain,  _ his heart beats.  _ Love, _ his heart beats.

Rey watches him.

_ Love is weakness,  _ she hears her grandfather say again for the millionth time. And maybe it is for Vader. The chink in his armor, the shattering of his control.

“Why?” he manages to ask at last. “Why are you looking at her?”

He knows she must have felt it. He knows she must know.

It’s a risk. And one she thinks she can take.

Because if love is weakness, then weaknesses combined can make strength.

Can’t they?

“He wants to kill her grandson.”

-

_ WE INTERRUPT YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING TO REPORT ON ONGOING CONFUSION AT THE IMPERIAL PALACE: Blasterfire is currently firing throughout the imperial complex. No one knows what’s going on, or if the Emperor is safe. Darth Vader’s lightsaber was seen flashing through one window, though, so it should all be over soon. _

-

She doesn’t know where Vader goes, just that he tells her to return to her chambers and bar the door to anyone but him.

Her heart is in her chest the whole time. She knows that barring her door won’t work on her grandfather, or Vader for that matter, but it should at least keep her from getting blasted to bits. She knows that something will happen. She doesn’t know what.

Fear lances its way through her. Her heart won’t stop pounding, even though she isn’t running anymore. She paces her sitting room, her eyes firmly avoiding Ben’s workbench. The lightsaber isn’t there. That’s as much as she has let herself look.

Back and forth and back she strides. Back and forth and back again. 

She doesn’t know where Ben is. She tries to reach out, to find him, sense him, but chaos reigns. Violence, and death, and competing orders. No sign of Ben.

Just a love that burns so bright it would set all of Coruscant ablaze.

_ Hers?  _

_ Or Vader’s? _

She realizes it doesn’t matter.

Love isn’t weakness: it’s strength. The strength to take a risk, the strength to fight, where before she’d only ever accepted placid captivity. She can bear the brunt of her grandfather’s yoke, but god forbid he threaten a hair on Ben’s head.

And then she feels him.

He’s running through the palace as quickly as he can, bright and blue and alive. She can practically feel bursts of adrenaline shooting through his veins as he blocks blasters fired at him with a blade of light.

Then he’s hammering on her door, and she defies Vader’s order and admits him at once and oh, oh the relief of feeling him in her arms, knowing that he’s safe--and if he’s not, they’ll die together.

-

_ Tragedy has befallen our peaceful and glorious empire: our great and glorious emperor passed away peacefully amidst the chaos at the palace. Lord Vader says that he had a heart attack. “He is quite old, after all, and it was a stressful event,” the emperor’s lieutenant said. “All perpetrators have been found and taken care of.”  _ __  
_  
_ __ Newly crowned Empress Rey and her new betrothed are taking a trip away from Coruscant to mourn and recover. Lord Vader has announced his retirement, and will be joining them on a trip to Naboo.

-

“When did you know you loved me?” he asks her quietly. 

Everything is quiet. Still. She knew that the galaxy could be quiet, but not like this. Whenever she traveled, it was to cities, not the countryside. She can hear nightbugs, and the wind, and the lapping of waves. And nothing else.

Nothing but Ben’s breathing.

“I don’t know,” she replies in a whisper. “It came on me suddenly, realizing I’d loved you a long time.” He smiles at her and kisses her temple. “What about you?”

He pauses for a long moment, then sighs. “The moment I realized no one had ever loved you before. That you were so strong, but your heart was so bruised and battered you didn’t know what love is.” His gaze is even. He sees her clearly, always has. It’s frightening, the way he can strip away the layers of her life with just a few words and leave her more bare and vulnerable than she is when she’s naked.

It makes her feel brave.

_ Love is strength,  _ she reminds herself as she pulls herself closer to him, kisses him lazily as the stars twinkle overhead. And she’ll love him. 

By all the stars, she’ll love him.


End file.
